CLUE: A Fast Parallel Clustering Algorithm for High Granularity Calorimeters in High-Energy Physics

One of the challenges of high granularity calorimeters, such as that to be built to cover the endcap region in the CMS Phase-2 Upgrade for HL-LHC, is that the large number of channels causes a surge in the computing load when clustering numerous digitized energy deposits (hits) in the reconstruction stage. In this article, we propose a fast and fully parallelizable density-based clustering algorithm, optimized for high-occupancy scenarios, where the number of clusters is much larger than the average number of hits in a cluster. The algorithm uses a grid spatial index for fast querying of neighbors and its timing scales linearly with the number of hits within the range considered. We also show a comparison of the performance on CPU and GPU implementations, demonstrating the power of algorithmic parallelization in the coming era of heterogeneous computing in high-energy physics.

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ThickBrick: optimal event selection and categorization in high energy physics. Part I. Signal discovery

Journal of High Energy Physics ◽

10.1007/jhep03(2021)291 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2021 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Konstantin T. Matchev ◽

Prasanth Shyamsundar

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Clustering Algorithm ◽

High Energy Physics ◽

Statistical Significance ◽

High Energy ◽

Event Selection ◽

Systematic Uncertainties ◽

Novel Approach ◽

Signal Region ◽

Energy Physics

Abstract We provide a prescription called ThickBrick to train optimal machine-learning-based event selectors and categorizers that maximize the statistical significance of a potential signal excess in high energy physics (HEP) experiments, as quantified by any of six different performance measures. For analyses where the signal search is performed in the distribution of some event variables, our prescription ensures that only the information complementary to those event variables is used in event selection and categorization. This eliminates a major misalignment with the physics goals of the analysis (maximizing the significance of an excess) that exists in the training of typical ML-based event selectors and categorizers. In addition, this decorrelation of event selectors from the relevant event variables prevents the background distribution from becoming peaked in the signal region as a result of event selection, thereby ameliorating the challenges imposed on signal searches by systematic uncertainties. Our event selectors (categorizers) use the output of machine-learning-based classifiers as input and apply optimal selection cutoffs (categorization thresholds) that are functions of the event variables being analyzed, as opposed to flat cutoffs (thresholds). These optimal cutoffs and thresholds are learned iteratively, using a novel approach with connections to Lloyd’s k-means clustering algorithm. We provide a public, Python implementation of our prescription, also called ThickBrick, along with usage examples.

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